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Tolth posted:I feel kind of tired of fighting the AI now, so on this topic - what are the best factions for pushing into the other planes and beating the "bonus bosses"? Warlock. Very late-endgame warlock is probably the most all-around powerful faction there is, and has access to swimming, flight, tunnelling, and pass through earth, as well as probably some other planar travel nonsense I've forgotten. Necromancer is best if you specifically want to gently caress around in Hades, as it's a bitch to get to otherwise. Barbarian is decent for it but can't use Planar Swap, which is absolutely essential for hilariously bullshitty Hades shenanigans. Demonologist is solid if you specifically want to gently caress around in Inferno, both because they can open a portal there and because they can summon the big fuckoff boss demons out of there, which is almost essential if you want to make headway (some of those guys can and will wipe the majority of your army within the first couple of turns). If you want guaranteed access to the Celestial plane, I think you pretty much need to be the Voice of El. Good luck actually conquering anything up there though, as angelic beings are ironically kind of a hard counter to you. Void exploration is completely impossible if you're not a High Cultist throwing around commanders with void sanity such as star spawn, and merely near-impossible if you are. You're golden if you manage to find the spire and conquer the Nexus atop it, though, as that plunks you squarely between the Elemental planes (and thus gives you direct or indirect access to most other planes). I'm convinced that the ideal approach is a cooperative game between factions. In particular, I wonder whether Enchanter can portal-link citadels in different planes.
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Sep 25, 2021 17:01
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All the planes are interconnected except Hades, so as long as you can get into one you can get into all. The most reliable route is to dig into Inferno, but if you can find an elemental portal that's the easiest way in.
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Sep 25, 2021 17:11
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There's always the Archmage if you're into OP bullshit.
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Sep 25, 2021 21:14
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"There can be no ruler as long as roaming Gods are destroying Elysium."  e: nevermind the eldritch doom gods accidentally blew themselves up while terrorizing a bunch of confused archers Angry Diplomat fucked around with this message at 00:24 on Sep 26, 2021 |
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Sep 26, 2021 00:04
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Yeah, Warlock for sure. Air summons can mop up the sky layer, earth warlock summons can tunnel into Agartha and from there into Inferno. Water warlocks can swim and use the maelstrom spell to travel to the elemental plane of water, where you can find a portal to get to the Nexus. Around the Nexus are gateways to the other elemental planes, as well as a gateway to the prison of the god Baal, and a gateway to the Eternal Vault, if you want to fight big bosses. There's also a gateway to the Primal Plane, but I haven't gotten far into exploring it yet. And being able to summon the elemental royalty makes conquering the elemental planes much easier.90s Cringe Rock posted:There's always the Archmage if you're into OP bullshit. Oh, what Archmage? Torrannor fucked around with this message at 00:35 on Sep 26, 2021 |
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Sep 26, 2021 00:32
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Torrannor posted:Oh, what Archmage? It's an AI only class, there's a mod to unlock it on the Workshop. I've never played it but since it's not supposed to be used by players I expect there's some real nonsense involved.
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Sep 26, 2021 00:55
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Archmage is a secret AI-only class that rarely shows up when you have higher difficulty AIs set to random. It gets the combined resources and rituals of most of the generic human mage factions and is tremendously bullshit. I don't know of any way to "officially" play it yourself, although I'm sure someone has probably tried to recreate it via mods. I suppose you could try to roll an enemy Archmage and then charm it.
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Sep 26, 2021 00:57
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Anyone come up with any fun themed games they like? I've been doing large map empire that is normal aside from 5-6 allied cultists, either as one of the cultists or not
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Sep 26, 2021 01:27
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The Chad Jihad posted:Anyone come up with any fun themed games they like? I've been doing large map empire that is normal aside from 5-6 allied cultists, either as one of the cultists or not That's a good idea. I'm really happy to see this game get a thread because it's a great game and sort of a... dumbed down dominions for rest of us. One thing I'm curious about are the various sorts of worldwide effects that can trigger and drastically change the game. The biggest one is obviously The Apocalypse, but in this version supposedly there's an Antpocalypse. Also one time I got a Cthulhu themed asteroid that fell and I went to go unsuccessfully kill. Anybody know of any other good ones?
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Sep 26, 2021 02:31
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I like CoE quite a bit, though I feel 'dumbed down dominions' is a bit harsh. Considering I bounced hard off of dominions 5. It really felt like the complexity was for its own sake instead of being any fun. Having options to play is good, but needing to keep track of many things just because tends to frustrate. Maybe I'm just dumb though. No idea.
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Sep 26, 2021 04:47
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i think that vs AI the two games are really of similar complexity. dominions only gets insane as a multiplayer game
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Sep 26, 2021 04:54
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S w a y z e posted:One thing I'm curious about are the various sorts of worldwide effects that can trigger and drastically change the game. The biggest one is obviously The Apocalypse, but in this version supposedly there's an Antpocalypse. Also one time I got a Cthulhu themed asteroid that fell and I went to go unsuccessfully kill. Anybody know of any other good ones? Off the top of my head: Cultists open a portal to Inferno. Demons continuously pour out of it, razing settlements and rounding up sinners, then bring those sinners home to their ovens to make more demons. This persists until somebody manages to destroy the portal. Some rear end in a top hat builds an evil statue that channels the power of Hades. There will be dispossessed spirits absolutely loving everywhere until someone breaks the statue. Evil Times. A bandit king has risen to power and there will be bandits all over the place for a while. Usually seems to end on its own pretty quick, probably because bandits suck poo poo so it isn't long before something eats the bandit king (he's just a slightly tougher bandit who hangs out in a castle with a bunch of other bandits). The veil between worlds is thin. If you do any magic rituals your commander will probably get horror marked. This is Extremely Bad. You can wait it out though. The event, not the horror mark. If you get marked it's time to write up your will. Spooky fog covers everything. Your vision radius is zero in most areas. This is exactly as annoying as it sounds. The various gold mine events. There are lots of different boss monsters that can randomly show up there and they're all loving horrible. Beholders, ancient dragons, horror olm posses, etc. There are also the lesser seasonal events, like fungus years, bumper crops, droughts, forest fires, visiting merchants, etc.
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Sep 26, 2021 05:25
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The Antpocalypse is just something that kind of arises naturally out of gameplay instead of having a specific event tied to it, in one of my recent games though the mist event kept firing over and over which severely hosed with my ability to stop the ants and put down new queens before they could lay colonies
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Sep 26, 2021 06:07
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Angry Diplomat posted:Off the top of my head: There's the variant of this where witches build a portal to the Primal Plane in a random Ancient Forest instead, causing a bunch of the wild-themed PG titans/monsters to constantly and repeatedly pour through until someone burns that forest. Or completely ignore them and use it as a handy portal to go explore the Primal Plane since it's minimally guarded (unlike the Infernal portal)
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Sep 26, 2021 06:35
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There’s one I encountered in 4, but not yet in 5 The tier 3 library on Elysium gets a little too adventurous with magical research, and good-sized chunk of Elysium is cast into the void.
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Sep 26, 2021 07:08
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the holy poopacy posted:Archmage is a secret AI-only class that rarely shows up when you have higher difficulty AIs set to random. It gets the combined resources and rituals of most of the generic human mage factions and is tremendously bullshit. I don't know of any way to "officially" play it yourself, although I'm sure someone has probably tried to recreate it via mods. There's a workshop mod ("Secret class unlocker") that changes the flags on the 3 secret classes so they're playable, without any other edits; seems to be for real as they show up in the middle of the class list rather than at the end like most modded factions. There's actually 3; Archmage, Beholder, and Goblin King. The Archmage appears to be a Druid, Enchanter, Necromancer, and Warlock simultaneously and has access to all their ritual spells, although his combat casting is Golden and Iron magic together rather than their respective schools. Beholder is a completely ludicrous mage who functionally is 6 l2 mages at once (casting from all of them each turn) with druid ritual casting. Mages seem to show up from at least the druid and hoburg factions. Starting troops are a mixture of animals, dwarves, and goblins. Goblin King is like Troll King but you...are a goblin instead of a troll, and don't appear to get the troll units at all.
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Sep 26, 2021 08:19
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Tolth posted:Goblin King is like Troll King but you...are a goblin instead of a troll, and don't appear to get the troll units at all.
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Sep 26, 2021 11:42
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Drakenel posted:I like CoE quite a bit, though I feel 'dumbed down dominions' is a bit harsh. Considering I bounced hard off of dominions 5. It really felt like the complexity was for its own sake instead of being any fun. Having options to play is good, but needing to keep track of many things just because tends to frustrate. Yeah I had a similar experience. I wanted to play with goons so I started watching some videos about the nations and gods and it seemed like the multiplayer meta was extremely complex in a way that just wasn't appealing. Like it was 10x the effort I would have preferred just to be competitive with someone - and rote memorization too. I'm sure you don't HAVE to play this way, but seeing the high level of it kinda turned me off a bit. Angry Diplomat posted:Off the top of my head: These sound pretty bonkers, I'm looking forward to running into that in future playthroughs. Oh, I remembered one more - the Druid's endgame - every deep woods starts spitting out ents that wander around eating everything. I think that's it? It would be cool to get some more player-triggered worldwide win/transform everything conditions. S w a y z e fucked around with this message at 19:12 on Sep 26, 2021 |
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Sep 26, 2021 19:05
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That's pretty much Scourge Lord's whole deal - he drains everything into a lifeless desert. High Priestess' endgame is similar, in that summoning Ba'al does extremely bad things to Elysium (he rapidly drains and corrupts everything near him) and some of her other endgame summons produce local heating (i.e. melt snow, cause forest fires, kill people over time, and bake everything into wasteland). The most spectacular is definitely the apocalypse, though. If you want to gently caress up the whole world and make everyone really annoyed with you, there's no better choice than Voice of El 
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Sep 26, 2021 21:47
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I've never tried the High Priestess but that sounds cool as hell. Do goons ever play this somewhere?
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Sep 26, 2021 22:07
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S w a y z e posted:I've never tried the High Priestess but that sounds cool as hell. Do goons ever play this somewhere? There's a goon discord, and I think there's a fair number of goons in other Illwinter focused communities. The new multiplayer lobby has made CoE considerably easier to play online with friends, might be one of my favorite features.
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Sep 26, 2021 22:38
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The High Priestess is one of the easier factions to play. They're a sacrifice-based faction, with their main gimmick being Blood Feast rituals that will permanently downgrade a settlement in exchange for summoning man-eating giants, with the quantity/quality of giants increasing based on settlement size. They're fairly cheap and tough for their summoning cost, which makes it fairly easy to get a few rolling doomstacks up at the start of the game that will easily steamroll indie settlements. The trade-off (in addition to permanently decreasing your gold/sacrifice income, of course) is that the giants (and your own T2 summons) aren't as tough as most of the other classes T2 units/summons, so you'll probably have to tech up to T3 summons to counter enemy armies once they hit that level.
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Sep 27, 2021 08:49
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And if you're opportunistic enough, downgrading settlements isn't even that much of a trade-off to begin with, since you can just scoot into enemy territory and turn THEIR villages into giants while leaving your own intact (gotta maintain that sacrifice income). Then, by the time they come rushing back to stop you from eating their villages, you already have a doomstack that they can't safely attack. High Priestess is rude as hell.
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Sep 27, 2021 13:38
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Inadequately posted:The trade-off (in addition to permanently decreasing your gold/sacrifice income, of course) is that the giants (and your own T2 summons) aren't as tough as most of the other classes T2 units/summons, so you'll probably have to tech up to T3 summons to counter enemy armies once they hit that level. This isn't my experience at all. Well, the giants aren't that hot to be sure, but the summons you get out of the 2nd tier summoning are pretty great. as long as you do the summoning in a desert. Like one of the results you can get is multiple level 2 spellcasters, and that's not that much of an outlier.
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Sep 27, 2021 13:47
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The giants are basically sacrificial tanks, so yeah they're not as nuts as some units - but they don't need to be. They're large and have a good chunk of HP, which lets them soak up a disproportionate amount of enemy hostility while the High Priestess uses her scary magic and various ranged units to shred enemy armies. The whole High Priestess army list is quite strong and, in my opinion, pretty tightly designed. Which is why she's so frustrating to fight against as a more gimmicky faction like Enchanter e: I suspect that giving HP a slight chance of summon hostility would do a lot to balance her against other factions. That way she'd be incentivized to build up her core army a little bit before spamming a billion summons, rather than just snowballing like crazy the instant she saved up enough sacrifices to cast her first big ritual. Angry Diplomat fucked around with this message at 14:02 on Sep 27, 2021 |
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Sep 27, 2021 13:59
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Angry Diplomat posted:I'm convinced that the ideal approach is a cooperative game between factions. In particular, I wonder whether Enchanter can portal-link citadels in different planes. I just did this in my game. Keep casting create artifact until you get a teleport scroll, jump into the plane, and set up a portal for a permanent link. You can also destroy Nexus, which is pretty funny.
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Sep 27, 2021 15:59
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avoraciopoctules posted:Enchanter and Warlock have late game ritual options for generating random items. Warlock does it by promoting a summoned cyclops. Additionally, mercenary mages also frequently come with artifacts as well, so you can just yank those off and move them elsewhere.
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Sep 29, 2021 01:27
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I had a pretty cool map where a portal led to the void, which was two steps from a fountain that led to heaven. I think it might be possible to wipe heaven using send greater horror over and over but who has the time for that, also greater horrors are actually pretty weak
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Sep 29, 2021 01:34
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Horror rituals are super disappointing in this game. There needs to be one where you summon a doom horror to rampage independently.
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Sep 29, 2021 01:55
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In COE2 the stuff the Shaman could summon at the highest level was sick. Tough thing that poisons the entire battlefield, Life draining tree, etc. And you got to keep the hex if any summons lived. Paying using herbs mind you. 
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Sep 29, 2021 02:24
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COE2 has about four classes that haven't been updated: The orc lord, the elf king/queen, the maharaja and the shaman. The orc lord was just a bunch of strong units with chariots, their unique thing was that their scouts and commanders could all burn forests, which basically no one else could do in 2. The elf king/queen had a variable called "life force" which was based both on what you owned and what season it was. The elf queen had it go up in spring and summer and the elf king was the opposite. Life force caused freespawn in all your owned forests, with the number and power going up the more you had. The maharaja had war elephants, tigers and stuff that all had jungle move. Plus, he could get rashankas who had a unique upkeep mechanic. Every year they would need to eat an elephant. The shaman was the strangest: they could send dreams to lower unit's magic resistance and then attempt to possess them. This worked on any unit. The other thing they did was summon one-shot spirits, powerful units that only lasted for the single battle. What made them truly unique was that both of these were targeted, you could choose the unit and square that they happened on. NewMars fucked around with this message at 06:16 on Sep 29, 2021 |
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Sep 29, 2021 05:13
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I was messing around with the hidden classes, and wow beholder is sure a thing. And apparently druid can just summon them if he has enough herbs?
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Oct 3, 2021 16:49
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Xarn posted:I was messing around with the hidden classes, and wow beholder is sure a thing. Yeah but they're buried in a huge random summon list, hope you like trying to fight off gods and elemental royalty with a hundred million moose and boars while you desperately try to roll for beholders
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Oct 3, 2021 17:13
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Yeah, Beholders are among (and are arguably the best of) the Druid's lategame summons. It's best to check their spells before sending them into a fight, as they're not shy about nuking tons of friendlies to kill a single enemy spearman the holy poopacy posted:Yeah but they're buried in a huge random summon list, hope you like trying to fight off gods and elemental royalty with a hundred million moose and boars while you desperately try to roll for beholders Don't have to fight anything if your opponents' big doomstacks are busy slowly wading through a shitload of freespawn in an effort to make headway against your multitude of self-capturing forests! (Not applicable to Warlock, High Priestess, and Demonologist due to their fire-causing summons, but if you let any of them start slinging endgame summons you're probably hosed anyway unless you're an equally hellish class) Angry Diplomat fucked around with this message at 17:19 on Oct 3, 2021 |
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Oct 3, 2021 17:16
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I invaded heaven as a demonologist and wow, demonologist is probably one of the worst picks to invade heaven with. Everything up there can banish your summons back to hell. I guess I can turn around and invade hell instead?
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Oct 3, 2021 17:46
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Can you open a portal to hell in heaven?
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Oct 3, 2021 17:56
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Yes, and it appears to have caused the angels to freak out and send a bunch of units through the other portal that spawned there (not the inferno gate). Hell does not appear to be invading from their side though.
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Oct 3, 2021 18:03
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the holy poopacy posted:Yeah but they're buried in a huge random summon list, hope you like trying to fight off gods and elemental royalty with a hundred million moose and boars while you desperately try to roll for beholders Dunno, the gods seem pretty good as well. Ents kinda suck though, but I think I summoned 3 ents for 4 beholders, 4 gods and some super huge snake? The beholders absolutely were the highlight tho. ------- Just ran into an 18 stack of fire giants. holy poo poo Xarn fucked around with this message at 23:00 on Oct 3, 2021 |
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Oct 3, 2021 22:55
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Just started playing a few days ago, Voice of El is awesome.
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Oct 21, 2021 10:27
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retpocileh posted:Just started playing a few days ago, Voice of El is awesome. Human Spearman: "Well, gently caress."
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Oct 21, 2021 14:02
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